InfoGuides: Collect Data with a Survey: Get Help

Online Courses

Coursera: Survey Data Collection Specialization
- from the University of Michigan
- Questionnaire Design for Social Surveys

Methods

The 12 Methodology Questions You Must Be Prepared to Answer About Your Survey (the Measurement Standard)
Polling fundamentals and concepts: An overview for journalists (Journalist's Resource)

Get Help

Contact datahelp@gmu.edu.
DiSC staff members are familiar with different aspects of locating and using data.

Digital Scholarship Center (DiSC) Workshops
Check out our workshops on SPSS, Stata, R, Cleaning Data, Surviving a Data Analysis Project, and more. DiSC schedules workshops for the fall and spring semesters. We add and create new workshops throughout the semesters, so check often.

More Information from DiSC
Get more specific information on best practices, software tools and "how to's."

Contact your subject librarian
DiSC and the subject librarians work together to to help you find resources for your topic area.

Use this guide as a starting point for locating data or statistics. Learn essential tips for finding and using statistics or data.

How to Use this Guide

Get Started organizes guides which focus on searching for statistics or data by subject area (e.g., health) or specialization (e.g., public opinion polls & social surveys, qualitative data).
Frequently Used Sources lists selected frequently used and well-regarded places to look for statistics on a variety of topics. These sources are good places to start if you need to search across multiple subjects.
Search Data Repositories to locate and download data sets from research studies. Often these data sets must be used with data analysis software (SPSS, Stata, etc.).
Tips for Finding Statistics explains how answering a few simple questions (where, what, when) will direct your search. Learn why these criteria are important and how you can use them to locate what you need.